High On Life is the brainchild of Justin Roiland, one of the creative duo behind Rick and Morty, a billion-dollar animated franchise that just finished its sixth season.

You play as a bounty hunter on missions to destroy targets in various bizarre worlds. A unique feature of the game is that all four available weapons have talking faces that address the player and react with unique lines at different points of passage.

Despite his success as a television writer, Roiland says the nature of games makes them a much more challenging task.

Course

FINANCIAL ANALYSIS

“It’s like writing a TV show that people can touch and screw up,” he told Sky News. — And as a studio, we want there to be a lot of funny plot surprises. Encounters with NPCs vary depending on which weapon you have in hand. Each weapon has its own complete set of dialogue and reactions. In fact, you write a lot more material.”

The studio tasked with bringing Roiland’s script to life is called Squanch Games and was founded by him in 2016.

Lead designer Erich Meier explained how challenging the game can be in terms of storytelling:

“You have up to four guns, and each one has a turn. So we needed to control how widely we could use it to make sure we could do it at all.”

Using II Midjourney when creating a game

Given how much work goes into game development, the idea of ​​AI doing the heavy lifting is very appealing. As AI develops, developers increasingly use them in production. High On Life was no exception.

While much of the design was drawn by hand, Roiland revealed that Midjourney’s powerful AI, which can draw original images based on written prompts, was used to add some detail to the alien worlds:

“It makes the world feel like a weird alternate universe to our world. And we used that to do some weird, funny ideas. I don’t know what the future holds, but AI will be a tool that can make content creation incredibly accessible. I don’t know how many years are left, but all you need is to be someone with big ideas.”

Erich Meir revealed that the AI ​​was also used to create voice samples for some of the characters and one minor character was given such a voice.

Elsewhere, the game features a full cast, including Roiland himself, Curb Your Enthusiasm star JB Smoove, and SpongeBob SquarePants actor Tom Kenny.

The game boasts a fantastically grotesque aesthetic, just like Roiland’s other works. While game development is in many ways different from TV show production, there are obvious similarities in the frenetic aesthetics and tone of Higher Life and Rick and Morty.

Roiland, who won an Emmy in 2018 for his role as Pickle Rick on Rick and Morty, said he was obsessed with aliens, Area 51 and abductions as a child:

“It gives you the opportunity to tell so many different stories that you wouldn’t be able to tell otherwise. Even some of the new ideas I have are all related to science fiction.”

Justin Roiland is silent on the details of these projects, it is known that some of them are being developed in Great Britain. Meanwhile, High On Life is already available on Xbox Game Pass or as a standalone purchase on Xbox Series X and S and PC.

What to play in December. Game releases of the month

Source: Sky News